AffinityLive Picks Up $2 Million To Save Project-Based Workers From Time Sheets

For designers, lawyers, accountants, and all other types of project-based workers, managing time and billing clients is an inevitable hassle. With a fresh $2 million in seed funding, AffinityLive wants to automate the entire process.

Bootstrapped since 2012, AffinityLive is currently bringing in more than $1 million in annual revenue. The company will ramp up its growth with the deliberately small round of financing, led by Australian venture firm Blackbird Ventures with participation from Rothenberg Ventures and a handful of angels.

“The professional services sector represents 14 percent of the U.S. economy by number of jobs, but running those business is actually really miserable because the technology has been basically unavailable,” says AffinityLive founder Geoff McQueen.

According to McQueen, professional service firms with under a hundred employees have been largely ignored by large enterprise software vendors like Oracle or SAP. As a result, workers are burning away unpaid hours just to add up the time they’re billing clients for.

What AffinityLive does, essentially, is combine project management, CRM, and time billing software in one dashboard, so that workers can see how busy everyone is on a given day and forecast how profitable that work will be.

By plugging into a firm’s existing calendar and email service, AffinityLive is able to generate time sheets that account for not only meetings and phone calls with a client, but the time spent emailing that client as well.

This is especially significant for project-based employees, because adding up a few minutes here and there emailing a client can be a huge pain.

In a survey of 500 workers last summer, AffinityLive concluded that professionals lost an average of $50,000 per year in revenue due to insufficient tracking of client emails.

If you extrapolate this to account for all professional services workers in the U.S., firms are collectively losing 50 million hours, or $7.4 billion a day, in productivity.

AffinityLive is currently working with thousands of customers in the U.S. and abroad, and McQueen says that 75 percent of their monthly active users are also daily active users.

“The professional services sector generated one in four new jobs over the last 12 months,” says McQueen. “The sector is booming, but these guys are struggling, so we see this as a really big opportunity to be this generation’s Oracle or SAP.”